Category Archives: self

blogs, internet, self, Wordpress

NoSpamNX – Kicks Spam Comments In The Butt Differently!

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In the previous post here, I talked about how spam-bots were attempting to spam this blog, and what I used to stop it. All went well, until a couple of  friends reported (via Facebook and Plurk) that they got errors trying to leave a comment on that blog post. After googling a bit, I found a few articles that reported operational problems with WP-SpamFree, such as this one here. Granted, the number of operational problems compared to the benefits WP-SpamFree is small, it is still a problem, and it may already have happened here on this blog. When I read that article, I thought it sounded like what happened here.

It was because of this that I went searching for a new solution, and I think I might have found it in this plugin here – NoSpamNX.

NoSpamNX uses a different technique to catch spam-bots – the “honey pot” concept. Give the spam bots useless fields to fill in, and if these fields are filled in when the bot tries to submit the comment, the whole comment is discarded. Thus, no Javascript and no cookies are required. That means even less legitimate users are affected, and will probably even work for users on mobile devices.

Continue reading NoSpamNX – Kicks Spam Comments In The Butt Differently! →

blogs, internet, self, Wordpress

WP-SpamFree Kicks Spam In The Butt!

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Some of you may know that I switched this blog from Blogger platform over to self-hosted WordPress very recently, thanks (or no-thanks) to Blogger’s decision to cease support for FTP publishing from 26th March onwards.

My blog has always been fine and relatively spam-free for the entire duration when I was on Blogger – about 7 or so years. I get maybe 1 or 2 spam comments every couple of MONTHS. Maybe my blog was (and still is) relatively unknown and only read by my friends and perhaps a few “drive-by” bloggers visiting other sites, helped with keeping the spam count so low.

However, as soon as I switched over to WordPress, spam comments started appearing. Not too many at first, maybe 3 or 4 per day. Still manageable. However, as of last night approximately 11pm Singapore time, I started getting a spate of automated spam-bot comments. No, none of them made it into the blog, all were flagged as spam and held in the moderation queue (yay for Intense Debate‘s spam filters!). However, there were like 300 of them in the span of 10 mins or so.

Continue reading WP-SpamFree Kicks Spam In The Butt! →

hardware, self

I’m A Logitech Man!

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I’m one of those people that don’t buy a complete set of PC from an established brand, be it Dell, Acer, HP or whatever. I have never believed in branded PCs, simply because the parts inside are all from the same places. They just package it together with “Technical Support” and a couple of “free software” (which you have to pay for in the end anyway) and mark the prices up to accomodate the support costs.

So yes, ever since I got my first PC XT (4.77 Mhz, 512K RAM) I’ve always “built my own” PC. Of course, nowadays I go to my favourite shop at the Holy Shrine of All Things Technological (Sim Lim Square lah!) and pick out parts I want, then ask them very nicely to help me fix them together. I would come back in about an hour or 2 and just pick it all up. But in the past, when I was younger and had more energy, I’d put everything together myself. In other words, I loved putting thermal paste on the heatsinks, stick it to the CPU (as in the chip, not the big case you guys call a “CPU”), then stick the CPU into the motherboard. I loved mangling all the wires, hooking up POWER, HDD, FDD etc cables to the the motherboard. I’d slot in RAMs and then fix it all into the case, and more fiddling of the wires. Continue reading I’m A Logitech Man! →